Thursday, 27 October 2011

RIM is rolling out a new cloud-based service for Microsoft Office 365.

(Credit: RIM)

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion has launched a new service that not only extends access to Microsoft Office 365 but lets businesses better manage their BlackBerry devices.
Currently available as a beta for Microsoft Office 365 customers, BlackBerry's Business Cloud Services offers four key benefits to potential customers, according to RIM:

BlackBerry Balance technology, which lets users see both personal and work-related content on their phones but keeps the two separate from each other.

Online access to smartphone security features where users can remotely lock or wipe their smartphones or reset their passwords.

An online console where IT admins can manage and secure the BlackBerry smartphones used by company employees.

"BlackBerry Business Cloud Services is an easy and cost-effective way for businesses and government agencies to extend Microsoft Office 365 to BlackBerry smartphones and manage the deployment in the cloud," RIM Vice President Alan Panezic said in a statement. "We have been working together with Microsoft and select customers through an early access program and we are pleased to now launch an open beta for the service."

Frankly we at the Web 3.0 Lab have never fully understood Microsoft mobile strategy. They seem to be perfectly happy with the iPhone being out there, they complain about Android though they collect license agreements on most Androids sold, they have a strategic relationship with one of the top business phone vendors and they push their own phone.

For Microsoft the future is the cloud. Even if the make a OS for small devices this OS may gain them little more than Internet Explorer, a long term headache. Frankly the web industry would be delighted to see IE in all its version vanish.

Mobile devices are becoming nothing more than windows to the Cloud, and Microsoft's Cloud is a business cloud. RIM has a well established proven technology that could easily catch up, and the Blackberry remains popular in the Enterprise. Microsoft should abandon the sinking ship of Windows Mobile and purchase RIM and turn that in to their platform.

But there may be method to the madness, unlike Apple Microsoft and Google make software, and being trapped in a single hardware platform is not where Microsoft wants to be. But also being forked between two main platforms, where one is highly established does not really make sense either.

Well the answer is simple, PowerShell is just so much better than stsadm.exe. PowerShell should be used for the following reasons:

It is now Microsoft Recommendation, don't want to go against that.

The language is much more elegant, easier to read and write once you get a hang of it.

The language now supports functions and variables, it is now more of a programming language.

Its more powerful, allowing you do things like putting site collections in new databases.

So is PowerShell just the new version of stsadm.exe?

No.

PowerShell provides a scripting language very much like PHP. In fact it is so like PHP that anyone who has done any PHP code will have no problem picking it up. Even if you don't know PHP anyone with basic programming skills will be able to pick PowerShell up easily. For example the following 'Hello world' command will look familiar to any programmer.

function HelloWorld()
{
$say = "Hello world"

echo $say
}

This ability to use functions and variables allows you to write, and pre-test powerful PowerShell solutions. For example imagine trying to script something like this in stsadm.exe

Hey, I am a System Admin not a Programmer, isn't PowerShell just over the top

No again.

PowerShell basic functions are much cleaner and easier to run than the same stsadm.exe code.

Example of PowerShell for dummies

Here is a use case. You have been given two backup files from a development box and you need to install the two sites in a web application, each in its own site collection with its own database. We assume here you have already added a second content database.

The web application is on port 80, and is called http://test and the two content databases are WSS_Contet and WSS_Content2. You need to update 2 backup files, one at D:\backups\home.bak and D:\backups\work.bak. Work.bak will be restored to a site collection at http:/sites/work

You are just going to be running PowerShell, you don't have time to make any saved scripts. You were thinking about just using stsadm but your boss, say a project manager, says you must use PowerShell.